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What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)

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Re: What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)

#71

Post by int_19h »

Yhippa wrote: post #13
jordache wrote: post #2

Anyone else remember that driver that allowed the internal speaker to output wave sound? I remember days of playing SimCity 2000 and Doom without a sound card, so it was just beeps and buzzes. Then one day I discovered that driver and started to enjoy small sounding wave sound

Not exactly that but a similar story for you. I was a huge dork in high school and figured out the sound API on my HP-48G which was just really a way to play a sound from the internal speaker at a frequency and duration. I programmed the first parts of Holst's Jupiter using my calculator and a friend's calculator. Man that was real fun to do. Created an API on top of that to simplify it to play notes at a certain len…

What boggles the mind is that they still sell those calculators. For like $60 apiece.

Re: What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)

#72

Post by simcop2387 »

DanBC wrote: post #19
jordache wrote: post #2

Anyone else remember that driver that allowed the internal speaker to output wave sound? I remember days of playing SimCity 2000 and Doom without a sound card, so it was just beeps and buzzes. Then one day I discovered that driver and started to enjoy small sounding wave sound

I remember building a resistor ladder DA converter and connecting it to the parallel port. Software like No$ gameboy emulator used it, and it was easy enough to write to the parallel port directly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covox_Speech_Thing

Was a fairly common thing back in the day for software to support it, also went by the name Disney Sound System.

Re: What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)

#73

Post by caf »

0x0 wrote: post #65
Dylan16807 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can leave long mode with a couple instructions. Was that not possible at some point? A good old triple fault should always work, shouldn't it?

This discussion is interesting, I had read earlier that long mode was a point of no return, I guess that's not true after all? I guess no v86 mode still makes it a dealbreaker for NTVDM type applications. Nobody wants to go back to a windows 95 style OS where a 16bit application runs unprotected and can stomp over anything and bring the machine to a halt. (For example, in win95 you could run debug.com and overwrite t…

The easiest way to host 16 bit applications now is to use the virtualisation extensions to run a VM in real mode.

Re: What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)

#74

Post by speeder »

dogma1138 wrote: post #52
yuhong wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This stuff is in the Super I/O chip.

Super I/O is dead and gone for like well decades. For Intel system super I/O was eaten by the ICH which initially kept compatibility with most Super I/O functions. By ICH 6 or 7 which is around the mid 2000's most of those legacy features were all gone. By 2008-9 the ICH was also gone and replaced by the PCH which doesn't have almost any compatibility or features with the Super I/O architecture.

What is the nuvoton superio chip on my ASRock z97 then?

Re: What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)

#75

Post by jordache »

int_19h wrote: post #70
jordache wrote: post #2

Anyone else remember that driver that allowed the internal speaker to output wave sound? I remember days of playing SimCity 2000 and Doom without a sound card, so it was just beeps and buzzes. Then one day I discovered that driver and started to enjoy small sounding wave sound

There were some DOS games that had that baked in. Here's one example from 1987 (!), that used CGA graphics. They couldn't really spare the processing power during the game itself, so they kept it for the intro and the main menu. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yL-u7lsMxk

Wow that must have been magic to anyone not aware such capabilitily existed

Re: What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)

#76

Post by caf »

StillBored wrote: post #26
dogma1138 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost nothing, there are some components that are emulated in software/firmware.

Well a certain amount of it is emulated in SMM, but from the fact that its still possible to boot DOS on most modern machines, a lot of the core hardware is still there emulated or otherwise. I was just reading a review on the Asus X99-A II, board where they were talking about the super-io chip's PS2 keyboard port. And IIRC, a couple years ago someone (IBM IIRC) dared to ship a machine without an 8042 keyboard contro…

The i8042 (potentially emulated) is still one of the more reliable ways to reboot.

Re: What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)

#77

Post by yuhong »

bonzini wrote: post #51
yuhong wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another error in this reply. It is in the southbridge not in the Super I/O.

The SuperI/O is the part of the southbridge (which later became the ICH and nowadays is known as PCH) that implements the legacy ISA chips (RTC, 8042[1], 8254, 8257, 8259). It used to be separate, which was already an improvement over the separate integrated circuits of 30 years ago. [1] nowadays the 8042 is mostly emulated in SMM because it needs to convert USB to PS/2.

I think the Super I/O is typically a separate chip on the LPC bus.

Re: What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)

#78

Post by dogma1138 »

speeder wrote: post #74
dogma1138 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super I/O is dead and gone for like well decades. For Intel system super I/O was eaten by the ICH which initially kept compatibility with most Super I/O functions. By ICH 6 or 7 which is around the mid 2000's most of those legacy features were all gone. By 2008-9 the ICH was also gone and replaced by the PCH which doesn't have almost any compatibility or features with the Super I/O architecture.

What is the nuvoton superio chip on my ASRock z97 then?

Most like the same things the rest of them do like SMBus, temperature sensors, fan control and voltage monitoring. They also do the GPIO for various other features like resetting the bios or switching between different BIOS flash chips, more recently the LED controls on the newer motherboards and the error code segment display that is now used instead of the POST beeping sounds so you can actually know wtf is going on :)

Re: What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)

#79

Post by yuhong »

dogma1138 wrote: post #78
speeder wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the nuvoton superio chip on my ASRock z97 then?

Most like the same things the rest of them do like SMBus, temperature sensors, fan control and voltage monitoring. They also do the GPIO for various other features like resetting the bios or switching between different BIOS flash chips, more recently the LED controls on the newer motherboards and the error code segment display that is now used instead of the POST beeping sounds so you can actually know wtf is going o…

Super I/O is not dead. It has the PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports for example.

Re: What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)

#80

Post by temac »

vanderZwan wrote: post #59
ChuckMcM wrote: post #30

That is a pretty awesome tour de force. Somewhere deep inside your computer is an (emulated) PC/AT trying to get out :-). An interesting lesson about the use of 'beep' for the assistive technologies. I see those sorts of things in architectures which have grown up over time and I wonder whether or not you could know at the time "Hey we're using this weird thing, please deprecated at your earliest convenience" or if i…

> Also an interesting take on how much Microsoft has had to unwind in a compatible way over the years. It's very much self-inflicted technical debt. From a Spolsky on Software article from 2004: > Raymond Chen is a developer on the Windows team at Microsoft. He's been there since 1992, and his weblog The Old New Thing is chock-full of detailed technical stories about why certain things are the way they are in Windows…

Well, an update is needed: the Windows testing team was huge. Now, if they remark at all a program has a problem, it will just be silently uninstalled during the next major Windows upgrade.
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